As technology has progressed in recent years, consumer electronic devices have emerged to become nearly ubiquitous in the everyday lives of many people. To meet the increasing demand that has resulted from growth in the functionality and mobility of mobile phones, navigation devices, embedded devices, and other such devices, many devices offer a wealth of features and functions in addition to core applications. Greater functionality also introduces trade-offs, however, including learning curves that often inhibit users from fully exploiting all of the capabilities of their electronic devices. For example, many existing electronic devices include complex human to machine interfaces that may not be particularly user-friendly, which can inhibit mass-market adoption for many technologies. Moreover, cumbersome interfaces often result in otherwise desirable features being difficult to find or use (e.g., because of menus that are complex or otherwise tedious to navigate). As such, many users tend not to use, or even know about, many of the potential capabilities of their devices.
As such, the increased functionality of electronic devices often tends to be wasted, as market research suggests that many users only use only a fraction of the features or applications available on a given device. Moreover, in a society where wireless networking and broadband access are increasingly prevalent, consumers tend to naturally desire seamless mobile capabilities from their electronic devices. Thus, as consumer demand intensifies for simpler mechanisms to interact with electronic devices, cumbersome interfaces that prevent quick and focused interaction become an important concern. Nevertheless, the ever-growing demand for mechanisms to use technology in intuitive ways remains largely unfulfilled.
One approach towards simplifying human to machine interactions in electronic devices has included the use of voice recognition software, which has the potential to enable users to exploit features that would otherwise be unfamiliar, unknown, or difficult to use. For example, a recent survey conducted by the Navteq Corporation, which provides data used in a variety of applications such as automotive navigation and web-based applications, demonstrates that voice recognition often ranks among the features most desired by consumers of electronic devices. Even so, existing voice user interfaces, when they actually work, still require significant learning on the part of the user.
For example, many existing voice user interface only support requests formulated according to specific command-and-control sequences or syntaxes. Furthermore, many existing voice user interfaces cause user frustration or dissatisfaction because of inaccurate speech recognition. Similarly, by forcing a user to provide pre-established commands or keywords to communicate requests in ways that a system can understand, existing voice user interfaces do not effectively engage the user in a productive, cooperative dialogue to resolve requests and advance a conversation towards a satisfactory goal (e.g., when users may be uncertain of particular needs, available information, device capabilities, etc.). As such, existing voice user interfaces tend to suffer from various drawbacks, including significant limitations on engaging users in a dialogue in a cooperative and conversational manner.
Additionally, many existing voice user interfaces fall short in utilizing information distributed across different domains, devices, and applications in order to resolve natural language voice-based inputs. Thus, existing voice user interfaces suffer from being constrained to a finite set of applications for which they have been designed, or to devices on which they reside. Although technological advancement has resulted in users often having several devices to suit their various needs, existing voice user interfaces do not adequately free users from device constraints. For example, users may be interested in services associated with different applications and devices, but existing voice user interfaces tend to restrict users from accessing the applications and devices as they see fit. Moreover, users typically can only practicably carry a finite number of devices at any given time, yet content or services associated with users' devices other than those currently being used may be desired in various circumstances.
Accordingly, although users tend to have varying needs, where content or services associated with different devices may be desired in various contexts or environments, existing voice technologies tend to fall short in providing an integrated environment in which users can request content or services associated with virtually any device or network. As such, constraints on information availability and device interaction mechanisms in existing voice services environments tend to prevent users from experiencing technology in an intuitive, natural, and efficient way. For instance, when a user wishes to perform a given function using a given electronic device, but does not necessarily know how to go about performing the function, the user typically cannot engage in cooperative multi-modal interactions with the device to simply utter words in natural language to request the function.
Furthermore, relatively simple functions can often be tedious to perform using electronic devices that do not have voice recognition capabilities. For example, purchasing new ring-tones for a mobile phone tends to be a relatively straightforward process, but users must typically navigate several menus and press many different buttons in order to complete the process. As such, it becomes apparent that interaction with electronic devices could be far more efficient if users were able to use natural language to exploit buried or otherwise difficult to use functionality. Existing systems suffer from these and other problems.